QUESTION: I was wondering if you had any tips on how to speed up animation workflow, and animating faster in general? In
many situations, the faster you have to animate, the less quality you can afford to achieve. But even in the “big budget” movies,
there can be stressful crunch times when you have to animate pretty darn fast — but you can’t sacrifice quality either. Since you
have so much production experience on big projects that require high quality animation, I was wondering if you’ve found any
time-saving tips, if you ever felt you took a big leap forward in speed, yet managed to produce great work?

Ten quick tips for speeding up your work:

1. Don’t skip the planning process. Seriously, I know a lot of you feel too busy to plan your scene before you open Maya or Max or whatever you’re using, but even if you can only dedicate 30 minutes to creating and/or studying some video reference and writing down some notes, it will help you finish faster. SOME amount of planning will *ALWAYS* speed up your work, no matter what. The best scenes I’ve ever done, and the quickest that finished, were the shots where I spent the most effort planning before sitting down at the computer.

2. Hot keys are your friend. Any time you find yourself doing anything repetitive in Maya (or whatever animation program you are using), create or find a hotkey for it. I have and use hotkeys for working quickly in the graph
editor (hiding/showing tangents, hiding/showing channel curves, etc.), for saving keys, for hiding/showing animation controls on the model, for X-ray mode, to make joints visible or invisible, for scrubbing time in the graph editor, and for instantly creating more workspace when I don’t need to see all the menus and channels. Those are just some of the hotkeys I use every day, and boy have they sped my work up.

3. If you have the ability to create or use a GUI that allows you to select your character’s animation controls, that can be a big help, especially for working with hands, tails, toes, etc.

4. Don’t get too bogged down in changes. If your director wants you to change the middle of your shot, just block it off (construction-zone style, as I wrote about in the newsletter), and create all new keys and breakdowns.
You can really get slowed down if you start trying to make any major changes simply by tweaking the curves you already have in the graph editor. Very often, it’s just faster to wall that part of your animation off (so you
don’t screw up the surrounding bits the Director *does* like), and redo that section from scratch. Cleaner and easier to edit, too.

5. Don’t be timid! Push your ideas and go for that dynamic pose. It’s much easier/faster to take something too
far and then back off on it than it is to slowly push your pose or idea a little bit further, a little bit further, a little bit further, etc. Just go for it and then reign it in if you need to.

6. Use light models if possible. Something that speeds up my work like crazy is the ability to just hit play in Maya and watch my animation play reliably at 24fps without having to do a playblast or render. Use the lowest-res version of your character as possible, at least for your initial blocking.

7. Same Avoid the black hole that is (insert favorite website
here). For me, I have to be careful with sites like Digg, YouTube, Gizmodo, etc. — these web sites that I really love can suck me in if I’m not careful, and suddenly I’ve lost an hour of time that I could have spent animating. Discipline yourself to only check your favorite sites when you have to, when you’re on a break, or when you’re rendering.

8. Same with email. Between ILM, Animation Mentor, my personal email, the blog, and the newsletter, I get hundreds of emails per day. Prioritize and only read the most essential emails until you’re on break or finished with your work for the day. For me, I try to only read email at work that is directly related to the show I’m working on, and then try to catch up on the rest before bed. (By the way, if you’ve emailed me and I haven’t emailed back — I’m really sorry! I’m kind of behind on my email, but I’m trying to catch up and will hopefully
get back to you soon!)

9. CPU, RAM, a decent-sized monitor, and graphics card. Don’t underestimate the boost you’ll get from investing
in the core bits of your computer. Beef up that machine for fast interaction with your character! The quicker you can interact with the character, and the quicker your program will update the frame, the quicker you’ll get your animation done. Along those same lines, a larger monitor will give you a lot more screen-space and make it much easier to see your character, saving a lot of “zooming in and out” time…

10. Use the 15-minute rule. If you come up against a technical problem that you can’t solve on your own in 15
minutes, give up, and find help. If you’re in a studio, ask a peer or pick up the phone and ask tech support.
If you’re at home, jump online and start searching through Google or post your question on the forum. In the past, I’ve wasted half a day trying to solve some problem on my own and it turned out that I could have solved it in 10 minutes if I had just asked someone for help. Update!

11. I just thought of another great tip someone once told me, so I’m adding it to this post! If you’re given, or give yourself, a list of changes for a shot, don’t do a test render of that shot until you’ve addressed all those changes. In other words, if you’re given 10 things to fix, don’t fix one and then re-render. Wait until you’ve fixed a bunch or all of those 10 things, and THEN do your playblast to see how it’s looking. The goal, of course, being to cut down on the time it takes to playblast and analyze the shot.

Hopefully that makes sense. In both cases, it’s important to think of your character as one unit rather than a collection of separate controllers. Because you’ve already started polishing him up, you want to salvage as much as you can, and this “construction zone” method of bringing a section of your animation back to what your blocking should look like is a terrific way to deal with late-in-thegame change requests from the people you are working for.

Well, that’s it! Hopefully this is new to some of you and you find it helpful. Next time we might jump back to the Q&A format as I have a lot of great questions to address, or maybe I’ll do a little half-and-half. Feel free to email me and let me know which you prefer!
Keep animating, and as always, have FUN!!!

Before any of my kind readers take offense, allow me to clarify that the dummy referred to above is none other than myself. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to quickly install a MEL script and then found that I can’t quite remember the correct sequence or where it’s supposed to go. So, if for no other reason than making sure I have a permanent record of how to do this on the internets, here goes:

1. Download your desired MEL script. My most-often used MEL script is probably AutoTangent, which I’ve gotten from a variety of sources, but you can reliably find it at Comet Cartoons.

2. The MEL script belongs in the scripts folder in your preferences for maya. For Mac users (sorry Windows folks, you’re on your own. In many ways.), you’ll put it here:

yourname/Library/Preferences/Autodesk/maya/2011-x64/scripts

3. Once you’ve dumped it in the right folder, open Maya and open the Script Editor. Navigate to File > Load Script. Once again you’ll need to navigate to the /scripts folder to retrieve your MEL script. Hit the play button.

4. Another way to do this is to open the MEL script in a program like TextEdit. The command for the script will be located by “global proc”

5. You can then copy and paste this command (here it’s autoTangent()) into the MEL script bar and hit enter to run.

7. On the left side of the window, scroll down to Users. Then, on the right side, select “New” and give your hotkey a name. In the Command box, type the short command (autoTangent()).

8. On the right side of the window, you can pick your hotkey and its modifiers. I’ve selected “K” because I know off the top of my head that it’s not by default assigned to anything else. Hit “Assign.”

9. Hit “Save” and you’re ready to go!

To my more tech-savvy readers, thanks for bearing with me! This process has frustrated me every time I reinstall Maya or wipe my hard drive. I ALWAYS forget to back this sort of stuff up.